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My first real introduction to UK politics was listening to an only mildly tipsy ex-London mayor rant about how if he could, he'd gladly "pay the rest of the UK £10 billion to go fuck itself, and get us towed out into the mid-Atlantic and declared an independent city state."

This impressed me on several levels. :-)

Boris Johnson then?

Nope.

Was it a Mayor or a Lord Mayor?

An ex-mayor, and not a Lord Mayor. Really small search space here. :-)

Indeed - London is a hugely different economy. But it relies on people commuting in across a huge area. Where all those salaries were counted would make a huge difference to how the system worked.

To make it work properly would probably require a different currency, so London£ could free-float to the sky like the Swiss Franc while the rest of the UK had a weaker £ more suited to export-driven economy. A large chunk of the economy would be exporting power and water to Londonistan.

London would become even more like Singapore or Dubai than it already is: skyscrapers for the mega-rich surrounded by immigrant guestworkers.

I always view London as a 'world capital' that just happens to reside in England.